Desert Southwest gardening can be sustainable, smart and spectacular.

Tag Archives: plant care

Your garden is prepped and you plant a row of carrot seeds or several cucumber seeds, just to be safe.You’re thrilled when you get a nearly 100 percent germination rate. Wow, you must be good! Or in my case, lucky. As I beam with pride, I know that the next step is to thin the seedlings. But sometimes, I fail to heed my own advice or that of horticulturalists. This year, I am trying to do a better job of thinning some of my vegetables. Baby steps…

This head lettuce is lined up nicely, but it’s still a little closer together than recommended. Of course, I can cut and enjoy it anytime — before the plants get too close.

First, let’s look at the reasons why thinning helps your crops and yield, and even improves the health of flowers you start as seeds in your garden:

A plant can only provide so much energy to the leaves, stems and fruit. If your aim is to get as many health, juicy tomatoes as possible, then most expert gardeners recommend pruning suckers from indeterminate, or vining, tomatoes. We often trim a few lower branches too, especially if they’re touching the ground.

The same goes for some fruit trees, though I’ve seen some advice that says not to bother too much with thinning unless it’s obvious that a small branch can’t handle the number of budding apples or pears. And clearly, a home gardener is probably safer letting nature and birds take care of thinning out fruit from upper branches! We chose not to thin our cherry tree and it handled the fruit just fine. The birds helped out more than I would have liked, but there were several bunches of six or more cherries on one spur and most of the tree’s fruit ripened fine.

These cherries were nearly ready to pick and growing fine in a large bunch.

With vegetables planted in groups or rows, such as carrots or lettuce, thinning is more to avoid overcrowding. The plants’ roots need space to grow underground – especially true of root vegetables. If crowded, the roots might not support full, healthy growth. And above ground, the leaves need air circulation and sun. Crowded plants hide bugs and hold water on their leaves. It’s like being squashed up in bleachers at a baseball game. Aren’t you more comfortable sitting out on the grass (or in one of those chairs with a cupholder), with the wind blowing through your hair?

I had to do a second thinning on the carrots in this container. They are way too crowded.

OK, still closer than the recommended two inches in a few spots, but closer. I’ll add a few of the tiny ones pulled up to my next salad.

I’ll add another reason to thin that I can more easily relate to. If I feel like pulling up seedlings that made it is wasteful, I have to look at continually watering seedlings I eventually have to thin out – or even worse, plants that grow to nearly mature height and then need pulling up because of a disease or just provide a low yield – as wasting water. It’s not right to let that plant continue soaking up water that could be put to better use.

These green bean seedlings are just about right. They can be four to six inches apart, since most of the growth — and the beans — vine up above the plant.

So, what can you do with seedlings so that you don’t feel like you’re wasting a viable plant, small as it may be? The little survivor, that broke through the soil and bore leaves? If the flower or vegetable is one that transplants well, you can move it to another spot, or try it in a container. Lettuce seedlings and carrot seedlings from a second thinning are often large enough to eat, even if they’re mostly garnish on your salad.

Of course, you can also compost the plants you thin and leaves or suckers you prune. When thinning, take care not to pull up the root of an adjacent plant. It helps to thin when the soil is damp and to avoid procrastinating until plants are large and closer together.

One of my favorite spring chores is pruning ornamental bushes and shrubs to get them ready for vigorous spring growth. I’ll throw in the caveat that pruning wild rose bushes is not a favorite chore. Even with special gloves made for rose pruning, I manage to stab myself around my upper arm, legs and shoulders. These are some pretty big bushes!

My husband and I have different philosophies on how to prune. He tends to cut a lot of the plant, but does a great job of shaping trees. I tend to underprune and some of the bushes look leggy, with too little growth on the lower portions of the branches. So we try to temper each others’ approaches.

Spring means the pear tree along the river (background) blooms big. It also means time to prune shrubs. The green plant in the left foreground was almost as tall as the red bud to the right only a few weeks before.

The best approach, especially in xeric gardens, is to follow the plant’s natural growth pattern. This means avoiding the “haircut” prune, or cutting a plant straight across the top. It’s like topping trees; it makes me crazy. A haircut prune on a bush forces new growth only along the top of the plant.

For deciduous shrubs (those that lose leaves in winter and come back in spring), pruning should include thinning to make sure sun reaches bottom branches and to prevent crossing or rubbing of branches. Gradual renewal pruning involves removing dead and old branches just above ground level each year. You also can trim to shape long branches.

Rejuvenate old plants by cutting up to one-third of the oldest and tallest branches just at or above ground level before new growth starts. Here’s the thing, though: Although experts generally warn against pruning an entire plant all the way to the ground, I have done that for several established woody plants that get long and leggy and have few flowers. I’ll even do it annually with great success.

For example, I trim Russian sages (Perovskia atriplicifolia) to just a few inches above the ground, or just above new growth, each spring and they love it. We had a hibiscus (I’m not sure of the variety, but see below) that we pruned to the ground each fall to help it winter over in Albuquerque. It came back in the spring, with huge, maroon-colored blooms that would cause people to stop on their walks and comment.

We trimmed this hibiscus, the plant with the large, deep read blooms, to the ground in the fall to protect it from frost and to produce foliage and blooms.

The hibiscus blooms were beautiful and continuous from mid-summer to early fall.

Finally, I trimmed an old and overgrown butterfly bush (Buddleia davidii) to just above the ground last year, and by the end of summer, it was more than six feet tall and full of deep purple blooms, butterflies and hummingbirds.

Butterfly bush (the woody plant in the back of the first bed) cut back last year nearly to the gtound.

Here’s the same bush in September from the other side. It’s happy, and so are the hummingbirds and butterflies.

Every plant differs in just how much to prune and when to prune it. For example, most of our xeric plants enjoy a cut in early spring. I wait until I see a little new growth appearing and then bring out my pruning shears. But we have a few forsythia bushes, which bloom early, but should be pruned after they bloom. And most evergreen shrubs need only some thinning.

Be sure to use clean bypass pruners and loppers on your plants, and clean after each use, especially if you cut any diseased branches.